Duck!

Beijing duck may be the consensus greatest hit of Chinese cuisine; universally popular, easy to eat, fearsomely complicated to prepare. It is the most expensive dish on the average Chinese menu, and the only one that must usually be ordered a day in advance--to a lot of people the definition of a really swank Chinese restaurant includes the ability to eat Beijing duck on demand. When travelers visit China itself, the reservation they beg from their hotel concierges is for Quanjude, the four-story restaurant off Tian An Men Square that has practically defined Beijing duck for almost 130 years.

When I spotted the Rosemead branch of Quanjude a few weeks ago, I cranked a U-turn so fast I almost wrecked the car. The place is a new joint venture between the Chinese restaurant and local investors, the first in the U.S., perhaps inspired by the success of the nearby re-creation of the Beijing Muslim-style restaurant Tung Lai Shun.

The ornate two-story foyer, which you reach through an office-building sort of hall from the rear parking lot, leads to a rink-size main dining room, filled to the beak with people eating duck. Quanjude is a grand restaurant, rich in banquet rooms, decorated with duck-etched glass, decked out with pictures of Richard Nixon and Boutros Boutros-Ghali where other restaurants might put their autographed 8x10s of Ed Asner. At one end of the dining room, a chef stands on a raised sort of stage, receiving ducks from a steady stream of attendants, deftly shaving curls of skin off the ducks with a slender cleaver, tossing the flesh-heavy carcasses into a plastic bin behind him.

The waiters already know what you want: It would be almost unthinkable to come to Quanjude without eating duck. Before the duck comes a small bowl of milk-white duck-bone broth, intensely flavored of the bird, then a couple of cold dishes (if you have ordered the two-appetizer, two-entree $48 Beijing duck dinner for four, which you probably should), maybe cool slices of braised beef shank or garlicky cucumber pickles or beef tripe seasoned with chiles. Then, very quickly, the duck: elegant, almost meatless slivers of skin that are like the world’s best gribenes.

If you are not Chinese, a waiter will probably come over to show you how to eat the duck, how to smear a paper-thin wheat pancake with a bit of the house’s bean sauce, top it with the white of a scallion, chopstick up a piece or two of the duck skin and roll it up into a kind of elegant taco.

The skin is crisp, giving way under your teeth like the glaze on a creme brulee; the sweetness of the bean sauce amplifies the duck’s unctuousness like the glaze on a Virginia ham; the sharpness of the scallion cuts through the sweet richness, bringing the whole dish into balance. It is an extraordinary taste, a harmonious sensation that seems worth the endless rounds of massaging and air-drying and stone-oven roasting that are necessary to get a duck to this stage, worth a trip to Beijing, let alone Rosemead.

Quanjude’s Beijing duck is so remarkably superior to the Beijing ducks you might have grown up eating that the effect is not unlike taking a first bite of first-class toro sushi after a lifetime of StarKist on Wonder Bread.

After the duck, there is more: sliced fish and white-meat chicken, soft as polenta, braised with bamboo shoots in a thick, white sauce of rice-wine lees whose fermented sweetness ranks it a specialty on its own; cubed whitefish sauteed with crunchy, identical-looking cubes of fresh water chestnut; even kung pao chicken. Spicy dishes--Beijing-style spicy tofu; spicy beef--can be dull.

But Quanjude is first a palace of duck: bring nine friends and have one of the special all-duck banquet menus.

To start are duck webs, poached and neatly deboned, sauced with a tincture of hot mustard; duck liver poached and sliced, that tastes like a marvelous pate; chewy, red-cooked duck gizzards pungent with garlic and soy; spiced duck-wing meat, suspended in diamonds of duck-blood-tinged aspic that look like a fancy cocktail-hour hors d’oeuvre from a 1952 copy of Gourmet; also, maybe a cuttlefish salad and a plate of cucumber pickles to throw you off guard before the inevitable arrival of Beijing duck with all the trimmings.

In place of the milky duck-bone soup, there are bowls of clear, delicate duck-breast broth, garnished with bouquets of crunchy, slippery, essentially flavorless white fungus, and a few duck tongues, which have essentially the softness and depth of flavor that long-braised brisket has when you’re in the right place.

After the duck, the duck keeps coming--braised duck wings with baby bok choy; crunchy sweet-and-sour duck with chunks of pineapple; a dish of sliced duck hearts, tender as chicken and remarkably mild, stir-fried with chiles and diced sweet peppers, the sort of dish you’re always hoping for when you order something Sichuan-style. A mound of deep-fried duck livers and gizzards seems a bit redundant after the braised livers and gizzards served as appetizers, but is surrounded with delicious, cigarette-thin egg rolls that are heady with the flavor of duck. Velvety duck-egg custards, garnished with a gingery sauce of ground duck, seems a cross between really good French oeufs a la neige and the postmodern “duck egg foo young” John Sedlar had on the menu at Bikini last year. Maybe you’ll get the chicken and fish with the wine-lees sauce, or maybe duck meat done the same way; there will be a vegetable, perhaps straw mushrooms cooked with tiny marbles scooped from a winter melon.

But, perhaps mercifully, there is no duck sorbet. You’ll get oranges and unsweetened yellowish squares of bean paste--enriched with duck fat?--that taste more than a little like chilled split-pea soup on a stick.

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Quanjude Beijing Duck Restaurant

8450 E. Garvey Ave., Rosemead, (818) 280-2378. Open daily, 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and 5 to 10 p.m. MasterCard and Visa accepted. No alcohol. Lot parking in rear. Dinner for two, food only, about $26.